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Items of Interest – 4-Mar-12 to 18-Mar-12

I couldn’t post an “Items of Interest” update last week since the Kahaani and John Carter posts took quite a bit of time to write (and besides, it took me time to get comfortable with the drawing tablet to make that picture of Vidya Balan). So this time you have a double-sized issue.

Before I get to the tweets and other links of interest, allow me to write about two awesome things that were recently unveiled.

Prometheus Trailers

This morning, the full trailer for Prometheus went online, in HD. Take 2 and a half minutes to watch this –

Incredible, right? The video page also includes the plot synopsis –

In the distant future, two superpowers control Earth and fight each other for all the solar system’s natural resources. When one side dispatches a team to a distant planet to terraform it for human colonization, the team discovers an indigenous race of bio-mechanoid killers.

Ridley Scott, director of ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner,’ returns to the genre he helped define. With PROMETHEUS, he creates a groundbreaking mythology, in which a team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a thrilling journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.

Somehow, I think I preferred knowing less about the movie, this explanation of the story somewhat demystifies Prometheus for me. Nonetheless, it’s still a terrific trailer and I can’t wait to see the movie this June, in IMAX 3D. I just hope our censor board guys won’t cut anything from the movie.

There was another trailer that preceded this, which came online yesterday. This post on FirstShowing has it. It’s also great and has some footage which isn’t in this complete trailer. A friend of mine aptly described this as “one big ‘Holy Shit’ moment that is 1:30 long”.

The Raid: Redemption Soundtrack

In my earlier post about the movie The Raid: Redemption, I mentioned that the American release of the movie features a music score by Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park and Joseph Trapanese. At TheRaidSoundtrack.com, one can pre-order the soundtrack album, and one can also listen to five tracks from the album.

The music in the above video is the opening bit from the track “Razors.Out”, which is also the music used in the Red-Band trailer of the movie. The track is by Shinoda with vocals by Chino Moreno. You can listen to it here (that’s a SoundCloud link, you can listen to the other tracks from the sampler too. The track “Drug Lab” is the one used in the most recent official US Trailer).

From the top to the end
You’ve got your razors out
To the end, til you stop
You cut the frames apart

That sudden sense of kinship I felt when my phone rang to the tune of Hans Zimmer’s “Discombobulate” from Sherlock Holmes in a bus, and ONE person somewhere amidst the crowds snaps around with a glimmer in his eyes… One of Life’s moments… 🙂

I was reading an article on Ken Rockwell’s site, called Making Great Photos in Crappy Locations – where he talks about locking yourself up in a bathroom (a literally ‘crappy’ location? Heh heh) and taking pictures –

Many photo classes have an assignment to lock yourself in your bathroom and shoot a whole roll of film. Your first reaction is “this is stupid.” Then things start dawning on you as you start seeing details. Eventually you make so many photos you wish you got to use more film.

That inspired me to try taking some photos under self-imposed constraints. No, I didn’t go into a bathroom, and I didn’t lock myself in – but I took some pictures in my room only, and decided that I’d only use my 50mm f1.8 lens. Till now, I really hadn’t used the “Monochrome” picture style on my camera, so I thought it’d be interesting to strip away colour and then shoot.

One of those photos has me holding up two pens, one labelled “Black” and the other labelled “Red”. I tried being clever there, though I’m not sure it comes across effectively!

The above image is one of the discarded photos that I didn’t upload on the ‘official’ set. (sort of like a “deleted scene” on a DVD). Again, this is me trying to be clever. The “on” light on my laptop is green, but you can’t see it since the photo is not in colour! Wow, how dramatic!

Other Links to See

This is a nice blog post about “Less is More”, from Mike Shinoda. He also writes at the end about a kind of extreme example of “Less is More”, with this piece of art.

I’d posted two nice music tracks from Final Doom: Evilution on Facebook – Legion of the Lost and Death’s Bells. I remembered these tracks from my Doom mapping days, so posted them. One of my favourite pieces of music by TeamTNT is the theme from “Bloodlands” – which I couldn’t find on YouTube. You can listen to it on this page (I know, embedded MIDI music is so 1990s, but still).

Interesting article in last week’s Economic Times about Nikon vs Canon and how they’re competing in India.

A friend told me about this song called “Looking Glass” by the band All Hail the Silence. An interesting thing is that you can get this song for free, by tweeting or posting on Facebook about it! Here is the ‘Tweet for a Track’ Page for it. It’s an 8 MB MP3, and a very retro / 80s style piece. As my friend said, it wouldn’t have been out of place in Nicolas Refn’s Drive.

In my review of The Artist, I had commented about the typography in the movie, and I mentioned that someone like Mark Simonson would be able to do a proper analysis of that. Well, a few days later, Mark Simonson did do a post on it from a typography perspective. A very interesting read.

Vincent LaForet’s post about Setting up your Canon HD DSLR for filming video. Unlike the more advanced Canon EOS DSLRs like the 7D and 5D Mark II, my EOS 550D doesn’t allow me to set ISOs like 160, 320, etc. Does anyone know if that’s possible, or do I just go with ISO 200, 400, and so on?

Edible Actors

Sometime back on Twitter, #edibleactors was trending. I found it very funny, so here are some of the names of actors that sound like food items –